PLCopen publishes packaging standards

November 5, 2014 - PLCopen working with other open standandards organizations including the OPC Foundation have created an open standards ecosystem that simplifies the communications of packaging machines with other plant systems and the business enterprise. These standards leverage the well defined and refined computer industy Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technologies which is the fabric of todays computing. The PLCopen standards advance automation systems technolgy that has lagged behind general comuting and software.

The Internet of Things, Industrial Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, and Smart Factory applications are growing and implementation is simplified with PLCopen OPC UA function blocks. PLCopen members are demonstrating these capabilities at the tradeshow to meet customer needs by conforming to the PLCopen OPC UA based standards for PLC, PAC, drives, and other industrial controllers. The open PLCopen industry standards improve automation system device interoperability, simplify sensor to enterprise, cloud, and Internet communications with PLCopen web services function blocks based on the OPC UA standard.

Today there are many vendor centric unique data exchange protocols that do not offer interoperability to transport information between controllers, systems, enterprise, and the cloud. The PLCopen OPC UA function standards are a universal, secure and reliable network communication method. This enables frictionless and out-of-the box information exchange based on computer industry standards.

Controller to Controller
PLCopen OPC UA function blocks are also defined for direct machine to machine communications between multiple vendor controllers to coordinate automation that has never been available before in the industry. These are important functions to achieve the goals of Industry 4.0, Industrial Internet of Things, and Smart Factory applications to improve manufacturing efficiency and productivity. These new function blocks simplify the integration of production, process control, packaging, and other machines into new efficient system architectures.

History
PLCopen and the OPC Foundation joined forces in 2008 to combine their technologies to a platform and manufacturer-independent information and communication architecture. A combined working group was started, focused to the mix of OPC Unified Architecture (UA) and IEC 61131-3, which creates interesting options for the realization of automation structures. The objective of the combined technologies is to increase the efficiency of the engineering process and information exchange.

The IEC 61131-3 software model has been mapped to the OPC UA information model creating a standard communicate information. This was first demonstrated at the SPS/IPC/Drives 2009 in Nuremberg, Germany.

About PLCopen
PLCopen was founded in 1992 as an independent worldwide association for industrial suppliers and users. It is the leading association resolving topics related to industrial control programming. PLCopen creates concepts to reduce the costs of industrial automation. These cost savings are realized in areas such as engineering, training, operation and maintenance. Together with its members, PLCopen creates specifications to materialize these concepts.